First Impressions Of Beijing
Guy fishing across from a hotel
China is pretty great. Really hip, Beijing at least. The corner bodega/kade has more beer and cheese than I’ve ever seen in SL. Ate fat oysters and scallops and infinite legs of lamb for like $10. Heard about a Brit who was beat for three years in jail. Drank some hawthorne infused whiskey sour at one of many local hipster bars.
Beijing is like Singapore without the antiseptic feel. They have working roads and great subways – and people playing cards and man Jong at every corner, and exposing their big bellies in what’s called the Beijing Bikini. Things work, but people don’t seem that oppressed. I mean, people seem free. They ride bicycles and electric motorbikes, three wheeled contraptions and cars. It’s hot and dudes just take their shirts off and walk around. We walked down a manicured canal, and saw one guy hanging on the end of a tree and another one plucking the fruit.
The hu tong (traditional hood) I’m I has little shops and bars and rests, street culture. It feels like Montreal. My ATM card doesn’t work and my friend’s house kinda smells of durian, but so far Beijing is cool as shit.
The Internet, however, is rather slow and weird.
Posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2012 in China.
Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, has a nice 
I’m happy to be featured in Echelon magazine’s 40 Under 40 feature, profiling young people who contribute to the economy in some way, mainly in business but also in terms of innovation and thought leadership. It’s an interesting article not just in that I’m in it (mainly for work on indi.ca and 
I won’t add too much commentary, but just read I guess. The youngest Rajapaksa, Rohitha (Chi Chi) has given an amazing interview to the 
In 2009 this strange character appeared on the Sri Lankan Internet scene, getting angry, flaming, trolling whatever. Then he started naming anonymous bloggers, posting comments as people’s kids, nasty stuff, for which I removed him from 
How does Beijing compare to Colombo? Which has a better quality of life for the average resident? Just curious.
Beijing undeniably.
depends. Culturally and commercially Beijing is great, but the air in Colombo is MUCH better and it is a more beautiful city (and island). They’re different.
Hmm internet is slow….just monitor HOW slow, compared to the supposed rating. Then we’ll know at what level of deterioration in quality to suspect big time snooping………;)
There are many possible explanations for slow Internet.
If slow compared to advertised is an indicator of snooping, snooping must be happening big time across South Asia. Check out how Sri Lanka and India do: http://lirneasia.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Broadband-QoSE-report-OCT-2011_V5.pdf
Snooping should not be done in real time if they must snoop. Also it is unimaginable to see how snooping can actually be done in real time, it’s not possible. Any overhead added to communication because they are recording things or w/e cannot be so much so that they affect speeds that much. SLT are bastards for advertising 2000 Kbps and only being able to deliver a fraction of that.
One of the major reasons why I would not want to live in Sri Lanka is because of shitty net speeds (believe it or not, that is hands down the one major reason, next to family/friends).
Prof. Samarajiva, what is our TRC doing about this? Are there plans for improving internet speeds in Sri Lanka, and if not what in your opinion is holding back Sri Lanka in this front? Is it that our demands don’t justify improving networks? I think improving networks and getting more people online will help Sri Lanka in a multitude of ways, especially the youth. Better informed and tech savy youth will take us a long way.
A single NarusInsight machine can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 DSL lines or 195,000 telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of one NarusInsight installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users
That’s very interesting. First I’ve heard of NarusInsight.
@Hibuddy, there’ll be few places in developing Asia (or Africa) you can live in, based on your criteria. What the TRC is doing is described at http://lirneasia.net/2011/11/trcs-broadband-quality-diagnostic-tool-publicly-available/.
Contrary to what most people think China is just another 3rd world country. GDP per capita (Current USD from World Bank) for 2010 is a paltry $4,428. Just to show your where China is, the GDP per capita of the US is a whopping $47,153.
Our GDP per capita is $2,375 and Malaysia’s is $8,373. Even Maldive’s GDP per capita is greater than that of China, i.e. $6,039.
What matters is GDP per capita and NOT total GDP. Only Shanghai and Beijing are so-called “developed”. Go a few miles out of these big cities and you’ll see billions of people living in utter poverty and squalid conditions. . China is just a hyped-up 3rd world country. Hyped up by the European’s themselves so that they can fool the Chinese to make their products at dirt cheap prices.
Most chinese cities are very well developed. In fact most chinese cities have more impressive infrastructure than the average american city. That is not to say they are not a third world country. But they are a very large economy, in a few years they will be the largest economy in the world. Nobody is fooling the chinese in fact the chinese are the reason so much of the the lower middle class in europe & America can’t find employment
The lower middle class in europe & America can’t find employment, NOT because the Chinese are better than them, but because they are dirty cheap. That is nothing to be proud of.
Having the world’s BIGGEST economy proves nothing. Indians also have a trillion dollar economy, one of the biggest in the world in terms of GDP numbers, BUT what is India?? A third world toilet, nothing else. If you want to grasp the prosperity of the country you have to look the GDP per capita. Although, GDP per capita will not always give you the correct picture (as in Brunei, whose GDP per capita is higher than the US, BUT it is so simply because 90% of it is composed of oil and gas) the exceptions are very few. The general rule is, the higher the GDP per capita the richer the country, economy and standard of living.
Most Chinese cities are the MOST polluted in the world.
http://www.china-briefing.com/news/2011/09/28/chinas-most-polluted-cities-who-index.html
Beijing, China’s capital city, is ranked the fifth most polluted city in China, and was the world’s 10th most polluted capital, ranking lower than Lagos in Nigeria.
Here are some traveller’s tails of the other side of Beijing:
http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/feliciawong/tibet_2007/1180746720/tpod.html
China is an over-hyped lemon, just like India. I think first impressions in 3rd world capitals can be very deceiving. Beijing is the capital of a 3rd world country and it will remain like that.
Chinese are better than the american lower middle class, because chinese can provide the same quality for cheaper. Why else would a company like apple, a company which puts a premium on quality, outsource their production to china.
Chinese are European wannabes. People think they are the next super power. What crap. I have been to China once. I got fed up after 3 days. Beijing is big, ugly, chaotic. It has no “soul”. Culture is nonexistent. There is one street totally dedicated to, believe it or not, dog meat. Yes, dog meat restaurants. People eat dogs just like we eat stir fried chicken. Please don’t give me that crap about “it’s their culture and like we don’t eat beef and that sort of crap”. I don’t buy that BS. Anybody who eats dog is not somebody I want to associate with. Some idiots compare this dump to New York. New Yorkers would start committing suicide if they here that.